Trump Full of Dire Predictions in Florida

(CN) – Donald Trump unloaded on his Democratic rival during an appearance in Ocala, Florida, on Wednesday, telling a cheering crowd “the election of Hillary Clinton would lead, in my opinion, to the almost total destruction of our country as we know it.” As the polls continue to deliver only bad news to the GOP candidate, Trump is growing more belligerent in his appearances, blasting not only Clinton, for whom the nicest thing he has to say is that she’s “corrupt,” but also the Republican Congress ” I am so disappointed in Congress … and I mean both sides,” he said and the media, which he says is both “dishonest” and in cahoots with the Democrats. He also says the country could be taken over by the Islamic State group if Clinton wins the Nov. 8 election. “They are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes president of the United States, because they’ll take over not only that part of the world, they’ll take over this country,” Trump claimed on Wednesday. Although he stopped short of citing the theories of “Ancient Astronaut Theorists,” he might be doing better with the electorate if he embraced the ideas popular television show. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Clinton with a seven-point lead on Trump nationally, besting him 44 percent to 37 percent; Rasmussen Reports has Clinton up by 4 points, and the L.A. Times/USC Tracking poll, which has consistently had Trump in the lead, now declares the race for the White House a tie. The polls don’t get any better for Trump on a state-by-state basis. A Maine People’s Resource Center poll released Wednesday show Clinton up by 17 points in the state’s largely Democratic First Congressional District, but Trump only up by 1 point well within the survey’s margin of error in the staunchly Republican and conservative Second Congressional District. Overall the poll has Clinton winning the state by 8 points. A new Marquette University poll shows Clinton up by 4 points in a two-person race, and by 7 points when Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein are added to the analysis. Trump leads by 5 points in Missouri in the latest Monmouth University poll, but an Opinion Savvy poll shows him trailing Clinton by 3 points in Florida. Hoping to turn his fortunes around in the Sunshine State, Trump predicted stark consequences for his Ocala audience if he loses the election. “Our country has never been so low,” he said. Later, in a moment that almost harkened back to Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when Hunter tells a hitchhiker, “We’re you’re friends, we’re not like the others,” Trump said he was “ashamed with what’s happened to our country … and so are you.” A large percentage of Trump’s speech was devoting to the ongoing WikiLeaks release of emails from the account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Trump’s main claim, though there are many, is that the Justice Department protected the Clinton during its investigation of her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. In the end, FBI Director James Comey criticized Clinton but did not recommend criminal charges. But Trump promised Wednesday that if he’s elected, he’ll immediately appoint a special prosecutor to pursue a criminal case against Clinton, “She has to go to jail,” Trump said as his supporters chanted “Lock her up! Lock her up!” “Worse, we have to investigate the investigators,” he said. The Clinton campaign has largely dismissed the latest email dump, and a spokesman, Glen Caplin, said “by dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump.” Among those, aside from Clinton, who got a verbal lashing from Trump in Ocala was House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump complained that Ryan snubbed him by not calling to congratulate him after Sunday’s debate with Clinton in St. Louis. “There’s a whole sinister deal going on,” Trump said. And that deal extends to news media’s coverage of the presidential race, Trump said. “Without the media and without the press … Hillary Clinton would be nothing,” he said. Trump’s campaign will move on to another battleground state, Ohio, on Thursday. Clinton was in Pueblo, Colorado on Wednesday where she offered an off-the-cuff assessment of just how badly things are going for Trump at the moment. As a security guard escorted a Trump support who had been disrupting her rally out of the venue, Clinton quipped, “You have to feel a little sorry for them, they’ve had a really bad couple of weeks.” Clinton said Trump’s “Scorched earth strategy” is just a sign that he’s grown desperate as he’s gotten ever-so-much closer to the political abyss. All he has left, she said, is “pure negativity and pessimism.”